Sex Says(33)

God, I hate him.



That had been my mantra for the entire fifteen-minute bike ride to my parents’ house.

I hate him. He may be really sexy, and the instant his lips touched my cheek, my nipples went into a full military-style salute, but I hate him. Yes, I definitely hate him. Obviously, my boobs just haven’t gotten the memo yet, but that’s to be expected. They’re boobs. They don’t have special talents like feeling feelings and picking up Reed’s weird radio frequency—they just react to cues for arousal.

I mean, was he trying to ruin my life?

And how in the hell had he known where I lived?

I still couldn’t believe he had the audacity to show up at my apartment, unannounced and definitely unexpected, and hand me an advanced copy of his column—one that consisted of a diatribe about penis pressure and how some people don’t want or need sex and blah, blah, blah.

Just like before, he’d read my column and twisted my words into something ridiculous. I wasn’t penis pressuring anyone. I had merely written a fun and entertaining piece about how it was okay to just want sex for the act itself sometimes.

Fucking penis pressure. Give me a break.

After reading his response, you’d think I’d told my readers to grab a ruler and a stopwatch and administer an elementary-style timed sex test to their significant others. If I didn’t dislike him so much, I might’ve actually applauded his ability to make magic out of mist. The fucker.

My family chattered around me at the dinner table, but I had nothing to contribute. I was too caught up in conjuring ideas for future columns and then disputing their validity as solid ideas based on how I thought Reed might twist and turn my shit to contradict me.

If I said, “The Golden Gate Bridge is huge,” Reed would take that comment and have a goddamn field day redirecting it into an existential discussion on what defines the word huge. Hell, he’d probably toss in an absurd argument based off of polynomial-time algorithms, and then I’d probably fall asleep because no amount of college algebra would help me understand polynomial time.

I groaned out loud and took the serving spoon for my mom’s famous mashed potatoes and scooped some onto my plate. And then I scooped another helping just for good measure. Hating someone was hard work, and my body needed to carbo-load if there was any hope of plotting my revenge.

“Uh, Lola?” my sister Annie called from across the table. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, Lo, you’re really getting at your mom’s mashed potatoes,” my father interjected. “Mind sharing some with the rest of us?”

I looked up and noted that everyone at the table—my mom, dad, Annie, brother-in-law Brian, even my nieces and nephew—was staring at me.

“I’m fine. Just hungry,” I muttered.

Annie quirked a concerned brow in my direction, but I ignored her. I knew if I made eye contact, she’d ask me a million questions about why I was smacking the mashed potatoes with the serving spoon. Sometimes sisters were a real pain in the ass.

This probably wasn’t the best night for me to attend family dinner at my parents’ house. And even though I always got bombarded with annoying questions about marriage and kids and renter’s insurance policies, I generally enjoyed our twice-monthly routine.

Thanks a lot, Reed. You’re even ruining family dinner night.

I slid the bowl of mashed potatoes toward my dad and settled into my plate. I was determined not to let that pretentious, know-it-all, newbie columnist fuck up the rest of my day.

Conversation continued around me, and I just tuned it out for the moment and focused on the baked chicken in the middle of my too-full plate.

But it didn’t help.

Bite after bite, I grew more and more angry. I had never really hated anyone in my life, but I really, really hated Reed Luca. With a fiery passion that made me better understand those women on that show Snapped—the one where they go off the deep end and kill their boyfriends or husbands. Not that I was plotting murder because, yeah, that was a bit over the top, but I could at least understand where those chicks were coming from.

“Henry,” Annie said in that disappointed yet irritated tone only moms use on their children. “Stop stabbing your chicken with your butter knife. That is inappropriate.”

“But…but…Aunt Lola’s doing it!”

I glanced up at the sound of my name, and then I watched Annie’s gaze move from Henry’s plate to mine. My eyes followed hers and, yeah, my nephew was right. I was currently stabbing my chicken with a butter knife. Mutilating it, actually.



Seriously, I swear I’m not actually plotting Reed Luca’s murder.